Dear Harbor Families,

Tomorrow, you will receive an important email from the school, with details about re-enrollment for the 2022-23 school year. In order to secure a spot in our program for your child, we will need your re-enrollment contract and deposit before the deadline of Friday, February 18th, which is two weeks away.

We are excited to share that we are rolling out a new system for enrollment and tuition management through Blackbaud, a highly reputable information management system for independent schools. This new system should make the enrollment and tuition process more efficient and user friendly and will be conducted entirely online. Please note that every family will need to register for a new account with Blackbaud, even if you had a tuition account with our previous system (FACTS). 

If you would like to apply for need-based financial aid and have not yet done so, please contact the school right away so we can expedite that process, which is thorough and conducted through an external system. For those families who have already applied, your adjusted tuition with the financial aid award amount,will be represented in the re-enrollment information we send tomorrow. 

We ask that you please be patient if you experience any challenges with the new system and contact us at administration@theharborschool.org if you need any support. Although we expect everything to go well tomorrow (and our administrative team has been working tirelessly for months to prepare for this moment!), we know that there is the possibility that there will be some challenges as we launch the new system. We hope that your user experience will be as positive as we think it will be!

And, for those of you who may not be as familiar with the independent school model for re-enrollment and admissions, I thought it might be helpful to explain the process of enrollment - to help everyone understand why the February 18th deadline is so important:

As you know, students who join our school move through a comprehensive admissions process to ensure that they are the right fit for our program. We take the time to get to know each family prior to enrolling students, and this process takes time and begins in the fall for many incoming families. As a member of the Association of Independent Schools of  Greater Washington (AISGW), we agree to a timeline that allows a fair process for families who are weighing decisions about the right independent school for their child, while also providing schools in our network the time for a full admissions process. Based on this agreement, we send out admissions decisions to prospective parents on the first Friday in March, with a deadline for enrollment two weeks later. 

In order to make admissions decisions and offer spaces to candidates who are the right fit for our program within each classroom cohort, we need to know exactly how many spaces we have for the next school year, and thus how many spaces we can offer to new applicants. Our February 18th deadline for re-enrollment provides us with a time window for these admissions decisions to be made by the AISGW admissions notification date of March 4th. 

Thank you for prioritizing the important task of completing re-enrollment for your child! We appreciate you and hope very much that your child and family will remain a part of the Harbor community in 2022-23 and beyond!

Warmly,

Leah Musico

Head of School